


i think i saw the world turn in your eyes

by pledispristin



Category: Wanna One (Band)
Genre: Celebrities, M/M, Misunderstandings, Mutual Pining, Notting Hill AU, Poetry, Slow Burn, bookshops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-10
Updated: 2018-09-10
Packaged: 2019-07-10 16:23:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15953096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pledispristin/pseuds/pledispristin
Summary: It’s a conundrum of a day; early December in London but the sun is shining, there’s been a new shipment of books but the store is barely breaking even, Cloud Books is a nondescript shop on Ledbury Road but an internationally famous actor has just walked inside.





	i think i saw the world turn in your eyes

**Author's Note:**

> okay so a couple of disclaimers
> 
> firstly, i’ve never written nielwoon before so this is definitely very experimental. i hope I did well!! i do love these two so if you have any complaints re: characterization or the expression of their relationship let me know for next time!!
> 
> secondly, this fic is based off a british film and the amount of location-specific references i realized i had to make means that this is set in the nice part of london. i am not a londoner, i haven’t lived in britain since i was three, and i am definitely not trying to display an accurate picture of what living in britain is like, which is far less idyllic than this fic and the film its inspired by would have you believe; this is not accurate in any way skdkdks
> 
> this fic took a goddamn age to write, it’s been a real labour of love and i hope you all enjoy it!!
> 
> the title is from 'turn' by the wombats and a playlist for this fic can be found [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/shahdiae/playlist/4npE8dSIa7RchPF1WYSDFV?si=k3pKAfNBR-ixdbL06YGmhQ).

Kang Daniel comes into Sungwoon’s life like an unexpected thunderstorm on a sunny day: unpredictable, without warning, and with the potential to be devastating.

Sungwoon isn’t fond of thunderstorms, he likes things to be planned-out and organized, and he doesn’t care for devastation (but, then again, who does?). He runs a bookshop; Kang Daniel is a film star with a secure seat on Forbes’s _30 Under 30_. Their lives run on fundamentally different planes, parallel lines that should never cross, except one day they do.

It’s a conundrum of a day; early December in London but the sun is shining, there’s been a new shipment of books but the store is barely breaking even, Cloud Books is a nondescript shop on Ledbury Road but an internationally famous actor has just walked inside.

Daehwi, Sungwoon’s volunteer assistant, squeaks slightly when he sees who’s just walked in and rushes into the backroom, muttering something about _need to finish the inventory_. (Cloud Books doesn’t _have_ an inventory. Sungwoon always has to remind himself that he needs one, but never gets around to doing it.)

He looks up from the counter, where he’s slyly reading _The Bell Jar_ under the table because of the simple fact that there hadn’t been a customer in here for the last two hours. It’s ironic, then, that his first thought is _huh, he kind of looks like Kang Daniel_.

Daehwi likes to say that Sungwoon lives under a rock, which clearly isn’t the truth because as the man moves closer to the counter he thinks _huh, I think that actually is Kang Daniel_. Of course he knows who Kang Daniel is. He’d seen _Beautiful_ ; most people had, especially most people who were both of Korean ancestry and somewhat pretentious. The Korean restaurant he occasionally frequents when he’s feeling homesick has a picture of him behind the counter, as if he’s the owner’s son.

He knows who Kang Daniel is, which makes it all the more inexplicable that here he is, inside Sungwoon’s little London bookshop that only sells carefully selected literary fiction, classics that get past the owner’s fastidious standards, and the occasional miscellaneous paperback. Things don’t _come into_ Cloud Books, things _turn up_ ; books, people, strays of all kinds. But Kang Daniel walks with purpose, ducks behind a bookcase as if he’s hiding from someone and not as if he’s looking for things; he hasn’t stumbled upon Cloud Books, Cloud Books stumbled upon him. He knows what he’s doing, and that’s disconcerting.

“Can I help you?” he asks finally, turning the corner of his page over and placing it on the counter.

Kang Daniel raises his head above a bookcase. “Just browsing,” he says, with the air of someone who is not _just browsing_.

Sungwoon shrugs. Generally, he likes to talk to his customers, to figure out what they like, especially if they’re the type who don’t seem like they know what they’re looking for, the ones who complain that he should stock contemporary fiction and university textbooks. He’s got a knack for it, diverting people looking for _The Hunger Games_ onto _Fahrenheit 451_ and people looking for _Twilight_ onto _Wuthering Heights_. Very few people ever enter Cloud Books, but even fewer people ever leave Cloud Books without making a purchase—despite the fact that Sungwoon struggles to break even, he sees this as an accomplishment.

But the idea that Kang Daniel would want to buy a book from him was ridiculous. He was Kang Daniel, after all; pretty much untouchable.

Kang Daniel clears his throat. “Actually, can you help?” he asks. His voice isn’t as clear in real life as it sounds on film, low and slightly hoarse, without the clipped over-enunciation of his words. A part of Sungwoon is almost glad for it; something separating Kang Daniel the celebrity with Kang Daniel the man standing in his shop. “I don’t recognize most of these books.”

Sungwoon laughs lightly, moving out from the counter and towards the shelves. They’ve got a decent collection, he thinks, although perhaps he just thinks that because he enjoyed most of the books in here. (Key word: _most_. His sister had advised him to stock some more well-known books that he either hadn’t read or hadn’t liked, her exact words being _you know, like Infinite Jest_.) “What do you normally like?” he asks.

Kang Daniel shrugs. “I don’t really read a lot,” he says. “Don’t have time.”

“That’s okay,” Sungwoon says. “What’s the last thing you read, then?”

Kang Daniel shrugs again. “Probably in high school,” he says. “Uh… _The Great Gatsby_?”

Sungwoon nods. “Okay,” he says. “Did you like it?”

Kang Daniel hangs his head. “Not really.”

“Neither did I,” Sungwoon says, grinning. Kang Daniel visibly relaxes. “Don’t worry about not reading much. To be fair, I don’t watch many movies.”

Within ten minutes, Sungwoon has amassed five paperbacks, from different genres and different time periods. “I’m sorry,” he says, placing them down on the counter. “You can pick and choose with these, really, but I get a bit overzealous when people let me recommend them books.”

And really—that’s not quite it. Kang Daniel is an enigma—not just because he’s famous, or a celebrity, but because he doesn’t seem to know _what_ he likes. Normally, people come into Cloud Books who _like books_ , even if the books they like aren’t quite the kind that Sungwoon sells. But Kang Daniel is something different—something the likes of which Cloud Books has never even seen.

“No, it’s fine,” Kang Daniel says. “I’ll buy them all.” (Internally, Sungwoon grins. Five books on one customer? That’s a deal he won’t argue against.) “Thanks for the help.”

Sungwoon begins to ring them up. “No problem,” he says. “I’m Sungwoon, by the way. I’m the owner here.”

“I’m Daniel,” says Kang Daniel. “Well, I mean, you—you probably knew that.” He smiles bashfully. “Thanks again—I’ll tell anyone looking for books in London about this place.”

And it’s a heartwarming statement—even if it rings with that kind of empty promise, the same way someone would say _sure, I’ll buy you a pony_ to their six-year-old daughter. The idea that Cloud Books is to be recommended—that Sungwoon is to be recommended, because he is as much part of Cloud Books as Cloud Books is a part of him—is one that warms his heart; even if it’s nothing that will ever come to fruition.

He watches Daniel leave, and then moves over to the storeroom to find Daehwi cross-legged reading a battered copy of _The Sun Also Rises_. Typical. At least one thing was normal today.

 

Sungwoon’s mother lives in a house by the shore in Brighton, and has done so ever since she retired six years ago at the ripe old age of fifty-two. She’s the kind of nouveau riche that makes old white people steam at the ears, a severe-faced woman sitting on the royalties from the company she’d started with her husband twenty-seven years ago.

Sungwoon loves her, but he doesn’t think they’re much alike in either facial features or personality, and he’s reminded of this when she peers at him suspiciously and says, “Who was in your bookshop again, dear?”

He opens his mouth to answer, but is cut off by Sooyoung replying, “Kang Daniel, mum. You know him—he was the brother in that one movie, you know, where the guy was in the police academy and searching for his long-lost brother, and then he bought his brother a motorcycle, and then he got framed—”

“Yes, yes, I’ve seen it,” says Sungwoon’s mother. “I liked the other guy in that movie, the lead. Couldn’t you have gotten him in your shop instead?”

Sungwoon laughs. “Sure, mum,” he says. “I’ll just summon a Korean drama actor into my shop on a whim. No big deal.”

Sooyoung laughs, too. “I can’t believe he just _walked into your shop_ ,” she says. “You know, my roommate in my first year was a Kang Daniel fansite? Her name was Vivi. It was wild, I was constantly having to cover for her being out of class because she was at some press conference.”

Sooyoung is his younger sister; twenty-one, spirited, currently studying for a degree in communications and media at Seoul National University all the way in South Korea. Her plan is to be a flight attendant—Sungwoon had never understood what she needed a degree in communications and media for. As a kid, Sungwoon was jealous of Sooyoung because he thought their parents were always on her side when they got into arguments—as an adult, Sungwoon is jealous of Sooyoung because she’s braver than him, more confident than him, and not wasting her time away in a bookshop that’s barely breaking even.

“What happened to your roommate?” he asks.

“Her parents figured out that she was using their money to run around Seoul for some boy and put a stop to it,” Sooyoung says. “I guess they didn’t really care that she wasn’t putting out for some guy she was in love with, it was for a _celebrity_.”

“Maybe that’s what made it worse,” Sungwoon says. “She couldn’t even go out with the guy she’s wasting all her money on, because he’s like, _untouchable_. So it’s even more of a waste.”

“Maybe,” Sooyoung says, her tone indicating that she didn’t really have anything else to say on the matter. “Well, you’d know a lot about falling in love with random guys, huh?”

It’s not meant to be insulting, but it feels like a dig at Sungwoon anyway. He’s always been the type to fall in love too easily—at a smile, or an inside joke, or a cup of coffee he doesn’t have to pay for—and it’s never ended well. When he falls for someone, it’s all-encompassing, an intense emotion that lasts far too long and leaves a nasty cut when it has to go. People don’t break up with Sungwoon because they’re terrible people, they break up with him because he’s boring and a homebody and has precisely one interest. But every time, it always ends with Sungwoon feeling like he’s given too much, much more than the other person even considered giving.

Sooyoung knows this, of course. But she’s his little sister, so he supposes she has a right to take digs at him for whatever she pleases. He hangs his head.

“Can’t believe he went into _your_ shop,” she repeats. “Your shitty pretentious literature shop.” Sungwoon clutches his heart, mock-offended. “ _Kang Daniel_. Of all people. I mean, I knew he was filming in London, but still, what a bizarre coincidence.” She pauses for a second, and then adds, as if an afterthought, “Did he buy anything?”

“I kind of recommended him five different books,” Sungwoon says. Sooyoung bursts into laughter. “He bought them all, but he looked pretty overwhelmed. I don’t think he’s really the type to read a lot.”

“I would be overwhelmed, too,” Sooyoung says. “Tiny bookshop man throws five books at me when I’m a world-famous actor who probably doesn’t have much time to read—let me guess, you gave him some fancy literary thing that is pretty much incomprehensible without Sparknotes, right?”

Sungwoon stares at the ground. “Only three of them were fancy literary things,” he says, hanging his head. “And I’m not tiny.”

Sooyoung bursts out laughing. “You are a character, Sungwoon,” she says, which is a phrase their mother uses quite a lot and one that never stops unsettling him. “Oh well. So long as you don’t _fall in love with him_ , it shouldn’t matter, should it?”

 

If you were to ask Sungwoon who his best customer is, he would most likely say it was Hwang Minhyun.

Minhyun’s in Cloud Books at least once a week. He works as a reporter for the _Daily Mirror_ ’s celebrity section, and the first thing he always says when someone finds out this fact is how much he despises his job. He has good literary opinions (most of the time) and he buys people books as gifts on a regular basis (seemingly all of the time, and also _holy shit he has a lot of friends_ ). He has either one long-term boyfriend or several short-term boyfriends in quick succession, who were all shorter than Minhyun (which wasn’t hard) and hated their job less than Minhyun does (which was even less hard). 

Right now, Minhyun is weighing two classics against each other as if he’s a scale. “Do you have anything with pictures?” he asks sarcastically, knowing fully well Sungwoon _didn’t_.

“I have some highbrow children’s books,” Sungwoon says, taking a sip from the takeaway cup of coffee he’d bought when he took his break half an hour ago. Minhyun rolls his eyes.

The bell on the door rings. “Damn, Sungwoon,” says Minhyun. “Two customers at once? Business is really booming. Perhaps next month you’ll be able to buy some picture books.”

Sungwoon glares at him briefly and then looks up, and is halfway through saying “Welcome to Cloud Books, how can I help you?” when he sees who it is. _Again_. For the second time.

A month, or just over it, had passed since Daniel had come in that first time, but it kept buzzing into Sungwoon’s head at random moments—the surprise, the satisfaction of having made a sale, the constant thoughts of how little this made sense. The bashful smile he’d given Sungwoon—not his celebrity smile, the one in all his press photos, but a shy quirk of his lips that was less dazzling, but, in a way, more beautiful. More human.

“Oh,” says Sungwoon articulately. He turns back down to the book he’d put down when Minhyun walked in, a ridiculously conspicuous way of deflating the situation.

“Holy shit, is that Kang Daniel?” Minhyun hisses. He raises his head, puts on a winning smile, and adds in a professional tone, “Mr. Kang, could I take a photo with you?”

Daniel stares at him blankly, as if he’d forgotten that he was famous or something. “Are you a fan?” he asks.

“Nope,” Minhyun says. “But my boyfriend is. He’s going to be jealous as _fuck_.” He pushes _The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy_ across the counter. “Ring this up, Sungwoon, I think it’s the best thing I found.”

When he leaves after a few minutes, just after taking a selfie and paying for the book, Daniel says, “I liked one of the books you gave me.” Sungwoon looks up. “I was reading it between takes and like—when I had off-time and stuff. _The Picture of Dorian Gray_? I didn’t really—I didn’t really get it, but it was good.”

“Ah, yes,” Sungwoon says. “ _All influence is immoral, because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul._ You agree with that?”

“No,” Daniel says. “Not really. I think—I think it’s impossible to go through life without being influenced—being influenced is human nature, it’s not—it’s not _wrong_.” He shakes his head. “I sound stupid. I’m not really a literary kind of guy.”

“No such thing as sounding stupid,” says Sungwoon. Daniel smiles at him, the same slightly disconcerted, reserved smile. “You liked, it, though? Even though you didn’t necessarily agree with it?”

“I guess,” Daniel says. “It was—thought-provoking, I suppose. I’m looking into a film right now, and it’s kind of—the headset of the character I’m going to play if I accept the role.” Sungwoon opens his mouth. “No, I can’t give you any information.” He leans against the counter as if he belongs there. “I was wondering if you had anything similar to that, though?”

“Similar in style, similar in setting, or similar in themes?” Sungwoon asks. Daniel stares at him blankly. “Okay, all three, got it.” He steps out from behind the counter and, as he does so, pushes the cup of coffee with his elbow accidentally, watching in horror as it splashes across Daniel’s shirt. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry—”

“It’s fine,” Daniel says.

“It’s not, I’m sorry,” Sungwoon says. “I—I live above the bookshop, I could probably—uh, find something?” Granted, Daniel was taller and broader than Sungwoon, but he was certain he had things lying around from an ex or something—he just had to dig for it.

“No, it’s fine,” Daniel says, but Sungwoon is already halfway up the stairs, beckoning for Daniel to follow him. Sungwoon’s apartment is small with a low ceiling and compact rooms, in the way that most London studio apartments were—nothing like what he’s sure Daniel is used to, but there’s no time to be embarrassed about it now. He rather likes his apartment, anyway—it’s small and things have to be hyper-organized because otherwise there would barely be space to breathe, but Sungwoon is small and he rather likes organization so it works for him.

Still, he wishes he still had some of his organization when it came to his boxes of miscellaneous crap that lay under his bed—most of them books, but there was a box filled solely with awards from his school days, and another that had Very Important Documents that Sungwoon was fairly certain strangers shouldn’t see, and finally he finds one that has _everything he never really wanted to look at again_ ; reminders of past relationships that go under his bed, hidden among the books that he loves and the achievements that he’s proud of. And in it, he finds a spare shirt.

“Here,” he says, passing it to Daniel, who’d followed him up and was gawking at him. He seems out of place in Sungwoon’s apartment, among the compact Ikea shelves illuminated by the morning light coming in from the window. He’s too tall, too broad, too untouchable—he’s a celebrity, and this isn’t the type of thing that celebrities do. 

Sungwoon tries not to focus on the fact that Daniel’s a bit taller than whichever ex had owned this t-shirt, with shoulders a bit wider. _Do not ogle the handsome famous man,_ says a voice in his head, a voice that sounds awfully like Sooyoung.

“Thanks,” Daniel says. He coughs awkwardly, conspicuously. “Uh, you were—you were giving me recommendations?”

“I was,” Sungwoon says. “Uh. I have—I have a translation of Faust somewhere?” Yes, Faust, that was a good thing to think about, not Kang Daniel and his mouth and his smile and his _shoulders_. After all—he was a customer, after all, and Sungwoon had to serve his customers and this was already _extremely_ unprofessional so he made sure to keep his mouth firmly shut as he rang up more books for Daniel and tried to ignore the thudding of his heartbeat.

 

Of course, ignoring it never works, because not five hours later Minhyun was in his shop again, this time trailed by a bored-looking man with light brown hair. “Minki, I told you, I know this place,” he says, sounding as if he was perhaps exasperated. “Just ask the owner what actually happens.”

“We work for the _Daily Mirror_ ,” says the man—Minki, apparently. “Nobody in the office cares about fact-checking. Just print the article and go.”

Minhyun glares at him. No, he was definitely exasperated. “Minki, you can’t just _print lies about normal people_ ,” he says.

“We aren’t naming the shop!” Minki says. “Just printing the facts! If the fans find this place then it isn’t our fault and we don’t have any liability!”

“Uh, excuse me,” says Sungwoon, slightly annoyed now with Minhyun and what he assumes is a slightly condescending coworker. The two of them stop their argument—Minki gawks at him. “But is there a reason you’re having this argument in my shop and not, you know, in the offices of the Daily Mirror or something?”

“Ah, yes,” says Minki. “There’s a bit of gossip, see, concerning this shop, and _Minhyun here_ doesn’t think it’s _ethical_ to post it without knowing your side of the story.” He frowns. “It’s not very believable, anyway. You’re too short to be Kang Daniel’s type.”

Sungwoon glares at him, annoyed, before what Minki said sinks in. “What—what about Kang Daniel?”

Minki and Minhyun share a Look. Sungwoon crosses his arms expectantly, before Minhyun blurts out, “Did you or did you not have sex with Kang Daniel?”

“What?” Sungwoon asks. That was the _last_ thing he’d expected Minhyun to ask. “What—no, no I didn’t!” He can’t help the defensiveness that creeps into his voice—sure, he’d never, but that didn’t mean he didn’t _want_ to.

“Interesting,” Minki says, sounding as if it’s the least interesting thing he’s ever heard. “Okay, Minhyun, you’ve had your statement, now can we get out of here and get this article ready for tomorrow’s issue?”

“Wait, this isn’t on the record, right?” Sungwoon says. He gets no answer. “I—I didn’t—nothing happened! He just came in and left.”

“There’s pictures of him going in and magically changing shirts in the middle,” Minhyun says. “Looks bad. Well, the link is tenuous at best, but you know how much people jump to conclusions.” He pulls a face. “London paparazzi are _nefarious_.” He smiles sympathetically at Sungwoon. “Don’t worry about it—I’ll make sure there’s no publishing of the name or address of the shop. And Kang Daniel has had worse rumours about him.”

“Worst case scenario, you get mobbed by crazy Kang Daniel fans for a few days,” Minki says lightly. Sungwoon had _seen_ videos of Daniel’s fans—he didn’t think that was in any way as _casual_ as Minki was phrasing it. “Might be good for business.” He crinkles his nose. “I’m sure you could do with a bit of a boom.”

Sungwoon opens his mouth, affronted, ready to defend the honour of Cloud Books when Minhyun raises a hand. “Seriously, Sungwoon, it’s not going to be a problem. But—I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do.” His face lights up slightly. “Unless you sue the newspaper and it has to shut down and it makes thousands of workers redundant so they can get other jobs and also they can stop giving me promotions so I can leave without worrying about losing the money.”

“Not gonna happen,” Minki says. “British tabloids don’t lose lawsuits.”

Minhyun’s face falls. “It was just an idea.”

“We’ll be on our way,” Minki says. “Would recommend you probably pick up a copy of the _Mirror_ tomorrow, though. See what they’re saying.”

“I’d rather die than pay for a copy of the _Daily Mirror_ ,” Sungwoon says.

“Good call,” says Minhyun.

 

As expected, business booms in the wake of the article.

Sungwoon doesn’t _have_ to buy it—Daehwi storms into his shop at opening time apparently having taken a detour on the way to school (or perhaps he was skipping class—Sungwoon wasn’t someone to judge). He’s accompanied by another boy, around Daehwi’s age looking as if he was very, very tired of Daehwi’s shit.

“What the hell, Sungwoon!” says Daehwi, pushing the newspaper across the counter. “I saw this on the front page and _immediately recognized it_ ; you can’t just _sleep with a celebrity_ and not tell anyone!” He glares at him, the effect ruined slightly by his posh private-school uniform and baby face. “You _lied_ to me. By omission. And you’re supposed to be an _honest man_.”

“You’re right, I am honest,” Sungwoon says dryly. “It’s a good thing I didn’t lie then. I haven’t slept with anyone.”

The other boy snickers. “Weak,” he mutters.

“That’s exactly what someone who slept with a celebrity and doesn’t want to admit it would say,” Daehwi says. “Did you have to sign a non-disclosure agreement or something?”

“There was no non-disclosure agreement,” says Sungwoon, “because there was nothing to be disclosed.”

It’s a little sub-box on the front page, showing Daniel walking in and out of Cloud Books in two different shirts. _Kang Daniel’s nocturnal activities????_ it reads, with a little note saying to read more on the _Celebrity_ section on page six. Really, there isn’t much to say, except for a small note pointing out that he’d changed his clothes (as if that wasn’t obvious from the pictures) and noting that _this could be a spot for a romantic tryst_ , which Sungwoon thinks is absolute horseshit. But that’s all there is—a little description and two grainy paparazzi photos, in between Kim Kardashian’s baby and _Celebrity Big Brother_.

“Do you think you can recognize the shop from this?” he asks. “Like, not you in particular, but—people?” The name of the shop is blurred out in the photo, but the surrounding area looks impressive.

The two boys look at each other guiltily. “Um,” says Daehwi. “I shouldn’t think so?”

 

But Sungwoon starts to notice things—girls, most of them teenagers, entering his shop in surprise, giggling to each other and whispering. The first few are met with a _excuse me, can I help you?_ because if Sungwoon is going to be infamous as _someone who might have slept with Kang Daniel_ he’s going to use it as an opportunity to sell more books. And, of course, to foster a love for reading in giggly secondary school girls. (But mostly just to profit.) 

Not all the fans are teenage girls—there’s older women, and even some guys. At one point, a whole group of middle-aged Korean women make their way in, laughing and talking to each other. (Sungwoon actually makes sales on them. They seem keen to buy from him, and call him a _very nice man_ , although one of them remarks coldly in Korean that he’s _awfully short, isn’t he?_ ) And not everyone seems to even be a fan—many of them are just interested, or unsure.

Daehwi comes back in after school—the boy from earlier is there, but so is a taller boy and two girls. (Damn, Sungwoon didn’t know Daehwi was so popular. He’d kind of assumed—no, _hoped_ —that Daehwi was the typical kind of person who would _volunteer in bookstores_ , the kind of person Sungwoon was at sixteen.) “I told you I know the owner here,” he says, sounding frustrated. “I volunteer here! I’m not making it up—tell them, Sungwoon, you know me, right?”

“Nope,” Sungwoon says dryly. “I’ve never seen you before in my life. Can I help you?”

Daehwi’s friends burst out laughing. “Stop it,” says the boy from earlier. “I was in here this morning and the owner did know who Daehwi was.”

“Ooh, Jinyoung, it’s not like you to skip class to trail Daehwi around,” says one of the girls.

“Shut up, Hyejoo,” says Jinyoung.

The third boy looks around. “Kang Daniel was here?” he asks, in a surprisingly deep voice for someone his age. Or perhaps Sungwoon was just used to Daehwi being the only person under eighteen that he knew. “Are you sure?”

“I sold him a translation of _Faust_ ,” Sungwoon says. “Pretty sure, yeah, unless he was a ghost. Are you kids going to buy anything, or just interrogate me?”

“Oh my god, I love that book,” says the blonde girl, looking up from the nails that she was examining on Sungwoon’s counter for the first time.

“Chaewon, you haven’t read a book for three years,” says Hyejoo.

“No, I did!” Chaewon says, crossing her arms and glaring. “I’m connected to Daniel. We read the same books.”

“Also, how the hell does everyone know where this place is?” Sungwoon says. “I’ve had so many people in here—and _barely any of them bought anything_ , so if you kids are just going to loiter and ask me questions then I’m going to—I don’t know, call your parents?”

“Someone figured it out on Twitter,” Hyejoo says. “Peaches are _crazy_.”

“Peaches are Kang Daniel stans,” Daehwi says in a stage whisper to Sungwoon.

“Stans are crazy superfans,” Chaewon adds.

“Thanks for the translation,” Sungwoon says laconically. “I’m not old enough that you’d have to explain what a stan is to me, I did hear that Eminem song when it came out, you know.”

“What Eminem song?” Hyejoo asks blankly. Sungwoon blinks. Maybe he _is_ old.

Sungwoon sighs. “Are you guys going to _buy_ anything?” he asks again, exasperated. They look at each other, and immediately erupt in excuses—they have GCSEs to focus on (Hyejoo says this), or they’re too busy to read (the deep-voiced boy says this), or they’re illiterate (this one comes from Jinyoung). 

“Does Kang Daniel come in here a lot?” Chaewon asks.

“He’s been here twice,” Sungwoon says. He looks around the shop, and then towards the stockroom, which was just _begging_ to be sorted. “But I know a way you can meet him if he ever comes in here again. It starts with you all volunteering to help me make a database of my entire stock of books.”

 

Still, in the aftermath of—whatever had happened over the last few weeks, Sungwoon’s business booms. Pretty soon, people stop coming into the shop because it’s _where Kang Daniel was one time_ and start coming in for the books. _The Guardian_ features Cloud Books in a feature about the rebirth of the independent bookshop, calling it a _hidden sanctuary tucked away among the designer shops in Notting Hill_. It tops Buzzfeed UK’s list of _13 Hidden Bookshops in London_. Sungwoon makes a bigger profit for January than he did for any month since Cloud Books first opened.

“I really think we should rebrand,” Daehwi says one day. “How do you feel about Cloudy With a Chance of Books? You could still shorten it to Cloud Books, if you want to.”

“That’s stupid,” Hyejoo says. “He’s finally getting more than two people a week buying from him, and you want to rebrand? Terrible business sense, Hwi.”

Ever since the _Incident_ as Sungwoon had decided to call it, Daehwi’s entire friend group had started volunteering off hours at the store; they had managed to sort his entire stock, and had now started bugging him about making a website for the shop. (“Sungwoon,” Jinyoung had said seriously. “If you want your business to boom, you need to know what you sell, not just have a vague ideas. Also, please commission someone to make you a website, it’s 2018.”) He’s not sure when he signed up to accidentally adopting a bunch of kids, but it’s fine—they’re sweet, and he’s not complaining about the work.

As it turned out, too, Daehwi knew _a lot_ of people. About fifteen percent of his new customers were people who knew him, and a surprising number of them were interested in the selection Sungwoon had. (He calls this the London private school effect, because he’s not sure how many of them genuinely enjoy the books they buy and how many are just pretentious with cash to burn.) A girl called Yeojin actually thanks him for _stocking modernist poetry that isn’t written in lowercase Times New Roman_.

Minhyun brings people in, too. Between hipster book lovers, Kang Daniel fans, and the combination of Daehwi and Minhyun’s friend groups, Cloud Books have had more customers over the last month than any other month that Sungwoon could remember. It’s great, actually; even if he misses the old days, when he could take his time recommending books and telling customers about hidden gems that they’d never heard of.

It’s February when he gets a phone call after closing time, on the landline that he uses to take work-related calls. “Ha Sungwoon, Cloud Books, how can I help you?” he says after picking up.

“Hello, Mr. Ha,” says a woman pleasantly from down the line. “You’re speaking to Ms. Jo, I’m Kang Daniel’s agent.”

“Oh,” says Sungwoon. “Is—is there a problem or something?”

“Not at all,” says the woman, her voice clipped and over-enunciated, agreeable to the point where it sounds false. “My _client_ wanted to state that if you have felt harassed by his fans or by the press as a result of your interactions and how they were reported, he’s willing to settle to give you monetary compensation.”

“Mone—excuse me, could you repeat that?” Sungwoon says. He has to stop his mouth from falling open.

“Yes,” the woman says. “Mr. Kang is very happy to settle with you on a sum if you have felt harassed or uncomfortable due to the actions of his fans as a result of—of your appearance in the media.”

Sungwoon stares at the table because he’s unable to stare at her. “I don’t want money,” he says finally. “The—tell Mr. Kang that business has been great, actually, because he visited, and so—so it’s not a problem at all, really, that there’s a lot of fans around. I’m not—I don’t feel harassed at all.” He pauses, considers. “Well, mostly.”

The woman hisses at someone else, clearly covering the phone microphone with her hand as she talks to someone else in the room. “Then thank you, Mr. Ha,” she says, hanging up the phone before Sungwoon can say anything else.

He’s not sure how normal this is. And, really, he could just ask Minhyun, except that there’s a part of Sungwoon that hopes that this is something special—that celebrities don’t always contact random people who get linked with them, that this is something monumental. It feels like the beginnings of one of his stupid intense unspoken adoration, like he’s falling in love again.

But this isn’t love. Sungwoon isn’t sure what it is—admiration, respect, maybe a little bit of a crush if he’s being honest with himself—but it isn’t love. People, normal people, don’t just fall in love with megastars; megastars don’t fall in love with normal people, either. They’re not on the same wavelength; they’re not even on the same plane of existence. Daniel lives his life in three vivid dimensions, in technicolour and bright lights; Sungwoon is two-dimensional on a good day.

But it’s nice, to think that maybe Kang Daniel cared enough to reach out to see if he was being harassed—or whatever. Sweet, but misguided. He tries his best not to smile softly at nothing in particular.

 

He gets a package a couple of days later, and for a second he’s confused because he hadn’t ordered a shipment of books. Then he picks it up and realizes that it’s definitely not books—it’s light, and looks as if it was hand-wrapped in the brown paper that it’s in.

“Ooh, what’s that?” Daehwi asks. Woojin—another friend of his, or perhaps they were related? Sungwoon wasn’t too sure and at at this point it felt rude to ask—swats his arm as if to say _shut up_.

“It says _confidential_ on it,” says Sungwoon. “I’m not opening it in front of you, Daehwi.”

Daehwi frowns at him. “But I’ve volunteered with you for _seven months_ , Sungwoon!” he protests loudly. Woojin swats him again. 

“Fine, I’ll open it,” he says, noting that there’s no home address but that there’s an American stamp. He tears the paper to reveal four clearly battered DVD cases and a note.

“What the fuck,” Woojin says. “Who would send _that_ as a gift?”

Sungwoon picks up the note. In messy, scrawled handwriting, someone had written _In our first meeting, you told me you didn’t watch many movies. I’ve sent three of my favourites from my apartment in L.A.—consider it a thank-you gift for getting me into reading books, or an apology for what I’m sure turned your life upside down!!!_ It’s signed _Kang Daniel_ , with a smiley face beside the name.

The note’s energy is infectious, and he can’t help himself from smiling. Daehwi whoops slightly. “Oh my god, who sent it?”

Sungwoon blinks and tucks the note into his pocket. “Nobody special,” he says. “Just—just my sister, Sooyoung, sending me some movies she liked. That’s the kind of thing Sooyoung does.” Well, Sooyoung _did_ recommend him movies, except she did it by either texting him in all-caps or surreptitiously adding it to his Netflix list on their shared family account. But Sungwoon wants to keep this to himself.

He spreads the DVDs out on the counter, glancing at the titles. It’s a diverse selection of films, much like the diverse selection of books he’d picked out for Daniel, and he _knows_ this isn’t what actors normally do for nondescript bookshop owners. _Spirited Away. Donnie Darko. The Breakfast Club. The Social Network._

There’s a note on top of the first DVD, a scribbled number on a yellow Post-It. _Call me,_ says the scrawl underneath, and Sungwoon wonders how Daniel can seem so accomplished, so self-assured, and yet write like an insecure eighth grader. He wonders how much of Daniel is an impossible conundrum, how much of him consists of contradictions that don’t make sense and idiosyncrasies that take a while to understand. He wonders if he’d ever be allowed to understand.

Then he remembers that it’s not his place to do so, and pushes all thoughts of Kang Daniel and his scrawled handwriting and the way his eyes crinkle when he smiles out of his mind. He takes all thoughts of Kang Daniel, shoves them haphazardly into a cardboard box, seals it, and traps it behind bright yellow Do Not Cross tape.

Still, he thinks, the movies might be good. He stacks them up again, tries his best to ignore the way his heart swells, and forces himself to forget about the phone number.

* * *

His next run-in with Kang Daniel is in April. Two months pass without much fanfare; Sungwoon watches the same four films religiously, brings in unprecedented amounts of profit, and quietly nurses a crush on a celebrity he’ll probably never see again.

It’s hard to fall into a crush—it’s not love, it can never be love—for a famous person, though, because you really can never escape them. You see them on TV, all over social media, on magazine front pages and movie posters on the side of a bus. It’s like a disconnected, communal shrine, spread out all over London, a reminder of how far apart Sungwoon and Daniel’s worlds are.

“What are you guys doing tonight, then?” he asks one day as he’s closing up. He’s affectionately started to think about the ever-growing gang of teenage volunteers that had turned up at Cloud Books as _the kids_ (or _his kids_ , if he was feeling particularly sentimental). Turned up—like everything else did at Cloud Books. Upper-middle class teenage bookworms and daily tabloid reporters and celebrities hiding away from the paparazzi. Short bookworms with no direction and old paperbacks with obscure titles and battered DVD cases.

“Going to go hang out at the premiere of _38_ ,” says Chaewon casually. “That’s the new Kang Daniel film.” (As if Sungwoon didn’t already know that. He had _tried_ to ignore the interviews that popped up in his Youtube recommended section, tried to avoid ending up in a rabbit hole of Daniel laughing with his co-stars and talking about the impact he hoped the film would have, but nothing ever really turned out the way Sungwoon tried to do it.)

“Shush,” Jinyoung says. “Don’t talk about his ex-boyfriend, Chaewon, what the hell.”

“He’s not my ex-boyfriend,” Sungwoon says, stifling a laugh. “We never dated, Jinyoung.”

“Ex-lover, then,” Jinyoung says.

“You kids are too young to be talking about _that_ ,” says Sungwoon, putting books that were left on floors or on the top of bookshelves back in their proper places. “But have fun.”

“Do you think Daniel will let us into the premiere if we say we know Sungwoon?” Daehwi muses.

“Hey, Sungwoon, take a picture with me for proof,” Woojin says, raising up his phone. Sungwoon isn’t really sure if he’s joking—from the looks on everyone else’s faces, he can tell that the sentiment is returned. “What? I wanna hang out with celebrities, too.”

(He doesn’t tell anyone, but he goes to see the film alone in the cinema a couple of days later. Sungwoon watches films with snacks snuck into the theater in the pockets of his jeans; Daniel watches them with flashing cameras and magazines tracking his every move. He looks up the photos of Daniel at the London premiere and sees a good-looking man in a tailored suit; Sungwoon himself watches _38_ in a four-year-old sweatshirt and unintentionally scuffed jeans.) 

(It’s just another painful reminder of how they couldn’t be more different.)

 

When he comes back from his lunch break a couple of days after that, he’s both stunned and yet totally nonplussed to see Daniel hanging around in front of the shop, wearing a hoodie and a hat and a face mask.

At first, Sungwoon thinks he’s just some weirdo, or an overzealous book lover. (He’s had a couple—mostly just tourists wanting to _see the real side of London_ who insisted that Cloud Books came _highly recommended_.) “Can I help you?” he asks politely, unlocking the shop door.

The figure motions for him to wait a minute, and then walks in behind him, watching as Sungwoon closes the door and pulling his face mask down to his chin. “Hi,” says Kang Daniel, because _of course_ it was Kang Daniel. “Nice to see you again.”

“You say that as if this is a chance encounter,” Sungwoon says. “You were waiting for me?”

“I was,” Daniel says. If Sungwoon didn’t know better, if Daniel wasn’t a celebrity with thousands of fans trailing him, he’d say that Daniel looked almost _shy_. He smiles nervously at the ground, something close to flustered, and doesn’t look Sungwoon in the eye when he talks. (Not that it would be easy to look Sungwoon in the eye. The brim of his cap is pulled down so low that Sungwoon can barely even see them.) “I wanted to see you.”

Sungwoon frowns. “Why?”

Daniel doesn’t answer. “Did you get my gift?” he asks instead.

“Yes,” Sungwoon says. (He decides not to tell Daniel that he’d watched the films over and over again, trying to figure out what it was that made them Daniel’s favourites.) “It was—it was an interesting set.”

“I wasn’t sure what you’d like,” Daniel says, shooting him a wide smile. That’s the patented Kang Daniel smile, Sungwoon thinks, the smile that had girls everywhere swooning and the boyfriends of those girls very irritated. _The face that launched a thousand ships,_ says a voice in his head. “I want to take you out, Sungwoon.”

It takes Sungwoon a couple of seconds to process. “Take me out?” he says blankly. “You mean, like, on a date? Or, like, with a gun?”

Daniel’s lips quirk. “On a date,” he says. Sungwoon stares blankly at him. “It’s just—ever since I was here before, I haven’t stopped thinking about you.” He smiles again. _Do not,_ says the voice in Sungwoon’s head, _let him have his way just because he smiled at you._ “I like you, and I want to get to know you better.” _You are stronger than this, Ha Sungwoon. You are not going back to being that idiot who falls in love with the absolute bare minimum._

Sungwoon frowns. “Why me?” he asks skeptically, not uncrossing his arms, shooting Daniel the best approximation of a glare that he’s capable of.

“When you’re an actor, you don’t really have many opportunities to date,” Daniel says. “When you find someone who—who you _like_ , it’s like—well, how often does this happen? You’ve got to—seize the day, and shit.”

Sungwoon raises an eyebrow, because—okay, perhaps he was a world-famous actor and all of that, but Kang Daniel was _endearing_. And he knew this—the interviews he’d watched, quietly hating himself and hating his stupid heart as he did, had taught him that, but it was something new when it was right in front of him, smiling at him earnestly.

“Okay,” he says.

“Okay?” Daniel repeats.

“Yes,” he says again. “I’ll go out with you. Come back here at—at eight, that’s enough time for me to close up and make sure there’s nobody hanging around.” He smiles, and Daniel smiles back, and this was a capital-B Bad idea but Sungwoon didn’t find himself caring.

He thinks back to his teenage years, of Sooyoung calling him a square and saying he never did anything interesting, that he was content to just exist. Perhaps this was his moment of stepping out, of doing something that wasn’t perfect.

(Or perhaps it was just a stupid idea. Sungwoon prefers to try and justify it, though.)

 

Daniel picks Sungwoon up on time, taps on the locked door and winks at him through the glass. Like this was a secret that only Sungwoon was in on—like it was Daniel and Sungwoon against the world. Something that could never happen in reality, but Sungwoon liked his books for a reason.

“You look nice,” he says as Sungwoon lets him in.

Sungwoon glances down at himself. He’d not expected Daniel to show up, so he hadn’t made any kind of effort—his t-shirt was about ten years old, his jacket even older, and his shoes had once been thrown in a lake by Sooyoung. “I look exactly the same as I did three hours ago.”

“Yeah,” Daniel says. “So, nice.” He takes his cap off and runs his hand through his light brown hair, leaving it on Sungwoon’s counter.

Despite himself, he blushes. He’s not the type to fall for flattery, and he sells books for a living—he knows his way around nice words. Except that these don’t sound like some idle flattery, some pretty words just thrown out for the sake of it. There’s an earnestness in Daniel’s tone, a kind of honesty that throws Sungwoon off-guard and that he doesn’t quite know how to react to.

Well. He supposes he _is_ an actor.

“You never called me,” Daniel says after a minute of secondly walking. They’d left the shop and ventured out on the street, uncharacteristically quiet—it takes Sungwoon a couple of seconds to realize Daniel is talking to him—he was too busy looking at him through his peripheral so Daniel didn’t notice he was staring. He’s wearing a hoodie with the hood up, but Sungwoon thinks if he was one of Daniel’s crazy superfans he’d be able to recognize him like this. He’d be able to recognize Daniel’s posture, the assured way he holds his shoulders, the movement of his arms when he walks.

Of course, this is all hypothetical. 

“I didn’t think you’d want me to,” Sungwoon says. “You know. With the whole world-famous actor thing and all.”

“I wouldn’t have given you my number if I didn’t want you to call me,” Daniel says. Sungwoon can’t really argue with that, so he doesn’t. “You live in a really nice area.”

“Thanks,” Sungwoon says. It’s the kind of empty small talk that he doesn’t know how to deal with, and he’s suddenly intensely uncomfortable. “How come you’re back in London again, then?”

“Hm,” says Daniel. “I suppose I wanted to come here for the company. There’s this guy, you know? Intense type. Short. Owns a bookstore.” Sungwoon’s suddenly very glad that the street is only lit up by street lights. “No, I’m still promoting _38_. I flew here to do a couple interviews I didn’t get to do when I was doing the first round of promotions. I go back to Korea tomorrow evening.”

“Oh,” says Sungwoon. He doesn’t know why he’s surprised—it’s not like he expected Daniel to stick around. He’s a world-famous actor, and even if he wasn’t, Sungwoon isn’t someone important.

“Yeah,” Daniel says. “You had better call me this time.”

Sungwoon laughs nervously. The truth is that he doesn’t plan to call Daniel—he doesn’t even plan to send a text message. That’s a terrifying concept—both the idea that Daniel _wants_ Sungwoon to call him, and the idea that he might change his mind. So he does what makes the most sense and deflects the topic to something Daniel can talk about, something that revolves around him. “The movies you sent me. What—are they your favourites, or…?” He trails off.

“I suppose,” Daniel says. “It’s kind of—that’s kind of the stuff I’d like to do. Well, not _Spirited Away_ , that’s just a really good film, but the other stuff—that’s the kind of role I’d like to be taking on.”

This is all pretty profound, but all Sungwoon can say is, “You’d like to take on the role of the Facebook founder?”

Daniel blinks. Then he laughs, a hearty sound from deep inside him that makes Sungwoon feel all of a sudden perfectly at ease. “No,” he says. “It’s like—the kind of ideas in a film like that, you know? It’s—well, have you seen the movie I was just in? The premiere was a couple weeks ago?”

“You weren’t in it much,” Sungwoon says, which is both an answer and not an answer at the same time. “You were really good at dying, though.”

Daniel lets out a laugh. _38_ is your typical grade war film—set in the Korean War, and centered around the intense love story between a nurse and a soldier. (Both of them are white, blonde, and very American.) Daniel plays a cadet in the South Korean army who fights alongside the male lead, and dies about halfway through the movie. He doesn’t really get much more fleshed out than that.

“You’d be surprised how many war films I get offered,” Daniel says. “It’s just—those films I gave you, they’re all about _people_. The plot is triggered by _what_ the characters do, not who they are or where they’re from.” He shrugs. “I’m still trying to establish myself, but—I didn’t start off in Hollywood, and it’s hard to shake off feeling like a foreigner.”

It’s a sudden drop of his collected farce. 

“But you grew up in the States, right?” Sungwoon says.

Daniel shakes his head. “I went there for high school, but I was born in Busan. I can’t speak the dialect properly anymore, though. How about you?”

“I was born here,” Sungwoon says. “Got the passport to prove it and everything. But my parents are from Goyang.”

“Huh,” says Daniel. “So, are your parents short too, or…”

Sungwoon rolls his eyes. “Shut up.”

Daniel laughs and sits down on a street bench, situated right outside the gates to a park. His face is lit up only by the street lights. “If I wasn’t so famous, I’d have bought you dinner,” he says. “But I’m not sure if I can risk it.”

“It’s fine,” Sungwoon says. “I’ve already eaten. If I hadn’t, though, I’d invite you back to mine.” He pauses. “For dinner. Not—yeah. For dinner.”

Daniel laughs. For a second, Sungwoon thinks he’s laughing at what he said, at how it had been halfway to a Freudian slip, but this isn’t that kind of laugh. He doesn’t sound amused—but Sungwoon doesn’t know what he sounds like if not. “You know,” he says. “You’re not like a lot of the other guys I know.”

“Yeah, I know,” says Sungwoon. “I’m shorter.”

Daniel laughs again—the same laugh from earlier, the one Sungwoon can’t read. “That’s not it,” he says. 

 

For a world-famous Hollywood star, Daniel is surprisingly easy to talk to. They’re still on two different wavelengths, but Sungwoon learns they’re at least within the same plane of existence. This information should be comforting, but it just makes everything seem even more terrifying; it’s one thing to have a bit of a celebrity crush and another to just have a regular crush. 

A couple of times, his fingers twitch with the desire to take Daniel’s hand. He ignores it. It’s probably one of the hardest things he’s ever had to do. 

Daniel walks him back to the shop. “Guess I’ll be leaving you here, then,” he says wistfully. And contrary to what he says, he doesn’t make any movement; instead just watches as Sungwoon fumbles with his keys and unlocks the door. 

“Guess you will,” says Sungwoon. “Unless you want to come inside?”

Daniel’s face crumbles. He opens his mouth to speak, closes it promptly, and for a brief second Sungwoon thinks he’s going to take him up on his offer. (This, too, is completely discomforting—Daniel had been in his shop before, and he’d even been in his apartment before, but somehow that felt like a thousand years ago, like it had happened to two completely different people.)

(All those other times before, Daniel had been a world away from Sungwoon—even when he’d stood in Sungwoon’s apartment, it had felt like an out of body experience, like Sungwoon wasn’t Sungwoon anymore for those few seconds. But now that Sungwoon knows he has three cats being looked after by his old classmate Jaehwan in Korea, and that he knows how to b-boy, and that he’d trained to be an idol until he got too tired of his debut being pushed back—it feels like it would be different.)

But then Daniel sighs. “I wish I could,” he says. “But my manager will skin me alive if I go missing tomorrow before my flight.”

“Oh,” says Sungwoon. And he feels stupid all of a sudden, for getting his hopes up so high, for kidding himself that they _aren’t_ on two completely different spectrums. Tomorrow morning, Daniel will take an eleven-hour first class flight to Incheon, and Sungwoon will prepare for another day of business and convince Daehwi that they don’t need a mascot, no matter how cute his dog is. In a week—maybe even less—Daniel will go back to being an active celebrity and probably film some variety show that everybody will watch, and Sungwoon will count his April profits and look up web design freelancers.

“Yeah,” says Daniel. 

He takes a step closer, and Sungwoon is hit by how much he suddenly wants Daniel to kiss him. How much _he_ wants to kiss Daniel. And for a second, he thinks Daniel will—and tries to still his heart, because it’s suddenly jumped into his throat at a hundred miles per hour. Daniel raises his hand, and Sungwoon yearns for him to cup his cheek with it.

Then he steps away. “Goodnight, Sungwoon.”

“Goodnight,” says Sungwoon. His heart still hammers. 

He stops for a second, then says, “Call me, okay? Or—or text me. I’ll be waiting for you.”

Sungwoon nods. He doesn’t remember what he did with the Post-It with Daniel’s number on it, but he’s sure it’s somehow ended up in a wastepaper basket somewhere. He wouldn’t call even if he’d saved the number, anyway.

Daniel walks away, and Sungwoon steps back inside. His eyes catch on something on the counter—the baseball cap Daniel had left, the one he’d been using to hide his eyes in case someone saw him. (Any other guy Sungwoon could’ve liked doesn’t use a baseball cap to hide from paparazzi. Yet another reminder of how far apart they are.)

He picks it up and decides he’s going to return it. Daniel had mentioned his hotel name in their conversation—he’d go in the morning, close up the shop for half an hour because nobody ever comes that early in the morning anyway. It’s his duty to return it, after all—Daniel had left it behind, and it would be several different types of awful to hold onto something of his when he really had no business with it.

(He definitely doesn’t want to give it back because he wants to see Daniel again. That would be stupid and desperate and a hundred different types of pining, and Ha Sungwoon is not pining for worldwide star Kang Daniel.)

 

So at nine o’clock the next morning Sungwoon locks up the shop and walks to the hotel Daniel had mentioned, baseball cap in hand, trying desperately to steel his face so he looked somewhat casual.

He’s not surprised that this is the hotel Daniel is staying in. It’s opulent from the exterior to the lobby, and he takes a second to stare, open-mouthed, at just how much it must have costed to decorate, to maintain. Distantly, he wonders how much it would cost to book a room here; something ridiculous, probably. Something only a crazily rich person would be able to afford.

He’s suddenly approached by a concierge, a boy whose name tag reads JIHOON. “Hello,” he says. “Can I help you?”

“Um,” says Sungwoon. “I’d like to know the room number of one of the guests here?” He holds up the hat. “I need to return something.”

“Oh,” Jihoon says. His face remains impassionately neutral, the same hospitable expression Sungwoon is sure has been trained into him, but he can see the unimpressed look in his eyes as they dart down to give him a once-over. “You’ll want the front desk, then.” He points over. 

For a hotel, the front desk is remarkably quiet—considering how expensive it must be to book here, Sungwoon isn’t surprised. There’s two workers at the front desk; a blonde girl who was looking unimpressed at her computer (a surprisingly ancient model for such a fancy hotel), and a girl with light brown hair who was drumming her fingers on the counter, clearly bored. Sungwoon takes his chances with the latter and approaches, saying, “Hi.”

“Hello!” the girl says. Her cheeriness is almost certainly fake, but Sungwoon can’t help but feel uplifted by it. Her name tag reads JIWOO, and has a little smiley face next to it that he’s sure goes against regulations. “Can I help you?”

“Er, yeah,” Sungwoon says. “I have something that belongs to a guest in this hotel?” He raises the cap. “It was left behind in—in my shop.”

“Of course, sir,” says Jiwoo. “What’s the guest’s name?”

“Kang Daniel,” Sungwoon says. 

Recognition flashes across Jiwoo’s eyes, but then she glances towards the cap and starts typing into her computer. (Briefly, Sungwoon thinks this must be a serious security problem, but he’s glad for it. He wouldn’t want to hold onto Daniel’s things, after all.) “Yeah, he’s in room 102,” she says finally, smiling brightly. “You’ll have to go up there to the elevator, then go to floor 1, and then it’s on the right.”

“Thanks,” Sungwoon says, and means it. Jiwoo’s smile brightens. He makes his way over to the elevator, tucked away behind a counter, and steps inside. _Casual,_ he thinks. _Don’t let him know how—_ He pauses in the middle of the thought, and rectifies it to _don’t make him get scared off_. 

He knocks on the door of room 102, and it opens after a few seconds. But it’s not Daniel who opened it—instead, somebody else opens. Good-looking, dark-haired, perfect jawline, very much shirtless—Sungwoon quickly realizes that it is none other than Ong Seongwoo, Daniel’s co-star in _Beautiful_ and general heartthrob. 

“Oh,” he says. “I’m looking for Daniel?”

Seongwoo blinks at him, and then his face schools into an unimpressed expression. “Sure,” he says. “So, we’ll never book here again since they just _give out room information on the front desk_.”

Sungwoon flushes and glances at the ground. “He left this behind,” he says, holding up the cap lamely. “In my shop.” 

“Huh,” Seongwoo says, his eyebrow raising in what was either disgust or thinly veiled interest. “Huh,” he repeats. “ _You’re_ the bookstore guy.” He looks Sungwoon up and down; Sungwoon can’t shake the feeling that he’s being scanned for viruses. There’s something robotic about Seongwoo that doesn’t come off on the screen—he doubts he’ll ever be able to watch one of his dramas again. “You’re shorter than I thought you’d be.”

Sungwoon frowns. The tone in Seongwoo’s voice doesn’t make it sound like an insult, but Sungwoon can’t shake the unimpressed expression, the ambiguous eyebrow raise. “Well,” he says finally. “This is Daniel’s, so, if you could—give it to him. Yeah.”

For a second, Seongwoo looks like he’s going to say something, but then he doesn’t. Sungwoon turns and walks away and doesn’t let himself try and consider the implications of that conversation until he’s back at his shop.

So Ong Seongwoo was in Daniel’s hotel room. Just—hanging out. Shirtless. Daniel clearly hadn’t been there—or maybe he was there and asleep? What did that even _mean_?

 _Maybe they’re sleeping together,_ says his mind as he unlocks the door. That _would_ make sense—too much sense. He racks his brain, trying to remember if anything had happened the night before to even _suggest_ that Daniel had any interest in him. He’d told him to call him—but friends called each other, didn’t they? He’d thought Daniel was going to kiss him—he’d wanted Daniel to kiss him—but he hadn’t, and maybe Sungwoon was just reading too much into it. Maybe Daniel just wanted to be his friend.

Maybe, he thinks, he’d been right the first time when he’d thought that Daniel would never, ever, be interested in someone like Sungwoon. Maybe thinking anything else would be kidding himself.

Or maybe Daniel was playing him for a fool. Maybe he could _see_ that Sungwoon felt—felt things for him that weren’t platonic. Maybe he could sense it, and he wanted to fuck Sungwoon over. 

And if Sungwoon was competing with _Ong fucking Seongwoo_ —well, that was it, wasn’t it? Nobody would ever be interested in Ha Sungwoon, who’s short and pretentious and doesn’t even have a Facebook account, when they could have somebody like Seongwoo. And Sungwoon thinks about all the people Daniel knows, all the actors he’d starred against, and his heart sinks.

He steps behind the counter and buries his head in his hand until his first customer of the day comes in, trying and failing not to think about Kang Daniel.

 

“So, what’s got you down,” Minhyun asks. It’s not a question—well, it is, but Sungwoon doesn’t really get an option other than to answer. 

“What makes you think I’m down?” he asks instead.

“You’re reading—” Minhyun squints. “ _Poetry of the First World War_. And you mentioned once that you only read war poetry when you’re going through something because it helps you put your problems into perspective.”

“Fuck,” says Sungwoon, cursing himself and his transparent coping mechanisms. “Can’t I just enjoy some World War One poetry? It’s one of the most transformative periods in literary history, you know.”

“Sure,” says Minhyun, snatching the book out of his hand and cracking the spine. “ _We are the dead. Short days ago we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved and were loved_ —yeah, Sungwoon, I really doubt you’re reading this stuff for fun.”

Sungwoon crosses his arms. “I have nuance.”

“I don’t doubt that you do, dear,” says Minhyun. “But clearly something is bothering you. So talk.”

Cornered, Sungwoon sighs. “There’s this guy who I like,” he says. “And we went on—well, I think it was a date, I’m not sure—but then if it was a date then he definitely cheated on me and if it wasn’t then I have no chance. And he doesn’t live in this country so—so I don’t really have anything to do.”

“That’s messy,” Minhyun says. “Who is he?”

“Kang Daniel,” Sungwoon says.

“Yeah, sure,” Minhyun says. “If you didn’t want to tell me you could’ve just said that.” He sighs. “You know, my advice is—well, figure out how you feel. And if this guy cheated on you, or if he’s—seeing someone else, as well, then he’s an idiot.”

Sungwoon scoffs. “You don’t know the whole story,” he says. 

“Don’t need to,” Minhyun says easily. “If someone isn’t satisfied by your whole—eccentric bookshop owner thing—then he doesn’t deserve you.” He grins. The somber mood lifts. “I mean, _eccentric bookshop owner_ is basically your entire personality, right?”

Sungwoon swats at him. Minhyun ducks out of his way. “Shut up,” he says.

* * *

Daniel flits in and out of Sungwoon’s consciousness for two months until he’s forced to confront it. In his consciousness, Daniel smiles winningly and burrows his way into Sungwoon’s heart, only to turn around and remind him how false his memories are. Sungwoon has a couple of restless nights and buys three separate anthologies of war poetry. He’s pretty sure he can recite all of _For the Fallen_ at this point.

It’s Saturday morning when Sungwoon hears Daniel’s name for the first time in a while. He’s not been active in the last couple months—there’s rumours that he’s working on something new, something big. Sungwoon remembers Daniel telling him about how _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ was helpful for characterization, and then immediately regrets it, the picture of Daniel’s bashful smile materializing in high-definition technicolor in his mind.

So the next time Sungwoon hears about Daniel aside from his late-night Google searches comes from Daehwi. Because of course it is.

He’s in a hushed conversation with Hyejoo and Jinyoung, and Sungwoon spies a magazine sitting on an open hardcover. He catches hisses of _Ong Seongwoo_ and _Dispatch_ and _outed_ , and he realizes with a sick horror what must have happened. What must have gone on.

“Let me have a look at that,” he says. Jinyoung’s head snaps up guiltily, but pushes the magazine across the counter. 

The photos are unmistakable—even if Sungwoon had only seen Seongwoo and Daniel in dramas, he’d recognize their faces from this angle. His stomach flips. “That’s awful,” he says. “That they just—told everyone.” He glances at the picture again, takes it in—the smile in Seongwoo’s eyes, so different to the look he’d seen when he met him in the hotel corridor. They looked happy. He hopes that they can still be happy, after this.

“It’s horrible,” Daehwi says. “If that was me….” He trails off.

“Well, he can’t really sue them,” Hyejoo says. “I mean, it’s a lose-lose situation, isn’t it? If he leaves it, people will just make their own assumptions, if he denies it—well, he can’t really deny it, can he? And if he sues Dispatch, that’s just basically confirming that it’s true.” She sighs and stands up. “I’ll be going, I have maths homework and this is all pretty depressing. C’mon, Jinyoung, you said you’d explain fractional differentiation to me.” 

Sungwoon sighs and cracks open the spine of his newest war poetry anthology.

 

That night, it rains—that kind of torrential summer rain that only ever seems to come at the end of a relatively warm June week. Sungwoon stays in the shop till late, the lights on as he sorts through the shelves; of course, he can’t help but get a little distracted, so he doesn’t notice the knocking on the glass until much later.

He looks up, wondering if it’s something important, and his heart skips a beat. _No way,_ he thinks—but yes, that is Daniel, standing outside his door drenched in rain.

For a split second, he considers keeping the door shut, until he hears the sound of thunder in the distance and rushes to open the door. “What are you doing here?” he asks, taking in Daniel’s experience—his messed-up hair, his drenched sweater with the hood up, the backpack around his shoulder. Daniel breathes heavily, dripping on Sungwoon’s carpet, and doesn’t answer. “Come on,” he adds. “We’ll—we’ll go upstairs. There’s no carpeting upstairs.”

“Do you have a shower?” Daniel breathes when they make it upstairs. Sungwoon nods. “Can—can I use it?”

And it’s really telling, Sungwoon thinks, that he agrees without even asking why. He settles down on his sofa, picks up whatever book sits on the coffee table, and cracks it open to a random page, not even bothering to pretend to read.

Twenty minutes pass before Daniel emerges, and it’s only then that Sungwoon gets a proper look at him—at his face. He looks _exhausted_. There’s bags under his eyelids, and his face is paler than Sungwoon had ever seen him; he looked as if he hadn’t slept in days. Sungwoon’s chest seize in horror.

Daniel smiles weakly. It’s a shadow of the smile Sungwoon is used to, and it just makes Sungwoon’s heart sink even more. “I’m sorry for springing this on you,” he says softly.

And really, Sungwoon shouldn’t accept the apology. At least without an explanation of what he was doing here, why he had just showed up outside Cloud Books in the pouring rain, (why he had literally taken Sungwoon’s heart and torn it into pieces). But the words don’t come out—they lodge in his throat, a pileup in his oesophagus composed of _when_ and _why_ and _I’m in love with you_.

And when Sungwoon says, “It’s okay”, he realizes that he might actually mean it. That it is okay—somehow, it really is. “What happened?”

 

Daniel laughs, humourless. “You mean you haven’t seen?” he asks. “My agency got me on the first flight out of Korea once they were notified that Dispatch were going to release those photos. I’ve had to buy a new phone number at the airport.” He sits on Sungwoon’s couch, sighing.

“The sofa is really old,” Sungwoon says quickly. “It’s not very comfortable.”

“I don’t mind,” Daniel says quietly. “Thanks for having me.”

Sungwoon doesn’t know how to respond to this, so he asks, “Why did you come here?” Then he winces, because he sounds like he doesn’t want Daniel here, and—well, he doesn’t, but not for the reasons Daniel was going to assume.

Daniel sighs and doesn’t speak for a couple of minutes. “London was—well, far enough that I wouldn’t be found if I didn’t want to be found, but not a total mystery.” He looks up at Sungwoon, makes eye contact with him for the first time, and despite himself, Sungwoon’s heart jumps. “I could book a hotel if you wanted me to leave.”

“It’s _fine_ ,” Sungwoon says. “I don’t have a spare room, though—I can sleep on the couch, and you can have my room.”

“Are you kidding me?” Daniel says. “You don’t even like me.” 

And for a second, Sungwoon thinks Daniel is making a strange kind of joke, but when he glances over he sees a serious look in his eyes. His tone is blunter than Sungwoon has ever heard coming from Daniel. “What makes you think that?” he asks, selecting his words carefully.

“You never called me!” Daniel says. “I thought you—you were scared off or something, like—like you _knew_ the situation, you knew how I feel—”

Sungwoon’s heart sinks. “That’s not why I didn’t call,” he says, thinking about Seongwoo’s smile in the Dispatch photos. Yes, he does know how Daniel feels—and that’s what makes everything all the more painful, because he _knows_ Daniel will never feel the way about Sungwoon that Sungwoon wants him to. “I was scared of—” _Of how I feel_ , his brain says, but he can’t form the words, and they find their way into Sungwoon’s throat-barricade. “I don’t know.”

Daniel sighs. “I’ll find a hotel,” he says finally.

“Are you kidding?” Sungwoon says. Daniel turns to him, and he flushes sheepishly. “It’s just—before, when you were here, two months ago—I had to give you something, and so I went to the hotel you were at—and they told me where you were staying. So if like—anyone finds out you’re in London, they’ll be able to know what room you’re in…”

He trails off. Daniel stares at him. “You came to my hotel?” he asks, sounding slightly winded.

“Yeah?” says Sungwoon. “And I went to your room to give you your hat back, and your boyfriend was there?”

“What boyfriend?” Daniel asks.

“Ong Seongwoo!” Sungwoon says. “You know, the guy—the guy you’re in this scandal with?”

Daniel stares at him, gaping like a fish out of water. “Seongwoo and I broke up three years ago,” he says finally. “Those photos are—they’re really old. I had _black hair_ in them.”

Sungwoon blinks. “But he—your hotel room?”

“We were in London at the same time,” Daniel says. “Seongwoo was filming—some music video, I don’t remember now. And we just booked rooms in the other’s name in case some stalker figured out where we were staying.” 

Sungwoon’s world flips on its head. _Great,_ he thinks—absolutely what he needs. The only thing keeping Sungwoon’s feelings for Daniel inside, keeping them from leaking out and spilling, was the thought that Daniel had Seongwoo, that he wasn’t _available_.

 _Just because Daniel isn’t seeing anyone doesn’t mean he’d ever like you,_ says Sungwoon’s brain. He sighs involuntarily and answers, “Quite a clever strategy,” careful to keep his voice level when it feels like it’s on the verge of cracking in two. 

Daniel smiles weakly. “What’re you reading?”

Sungwoon blinks, and looks down to the book in his lap—he’d totally forgotten about it, and hadn’t even looked at the text since opening it. “Um,” he says, flipping to check the front cover. “An anthology of Romantic poetry?”

“Like, love poems?” Daniel says. “That like—summer’s day kind of shit?”

“No, like, Romantic,” says Sungwoon. “With a capital R.” Daniel stares at him. “You know—Wordsworth? Keats? Coleridge?”

 

“You have to know I have no idea what you’re talking about,” says Daniel. “Like, absolutely no clue.”

Sungwoon laughs softly. “I’ll read some, then,” he says, glancing down at the page he had been open on. “ _Earth has not anything to show more fair: dull would he be of soul who could pass by a sight so touching in its majesty: this City now doth, like a garment, wear_ —”

 

“Is he talking about London?” Daniel asks.

Sungwoon glances at him. “What makes you think it’s London?” 

Daniel shrugs. “Maybe it’s your accent,” he says, settling down along Sungwoon’s sofa, his legs hanging off the top. Sungwoon gives him a strange look, and he grins, resting his head against Sungwoon’s thigh. Sungwoon’s brain short-circuits.

“Sure,” he says, his voice unnaturally pitchy. “Well, yeah. He is talking about London. Um—he lived in the Lake District, which is—up north, and there’s lakes and stuff.”

“Somehow, I figured that out from the name,” Daniel says dryly.

“Shut up,” says Sungwoon, cheeks flushing. “So he really didn’t like—industrialisation and stuff. Because this was during the Industrial Revolution, and—” He trails off. “I’m rambling, I’m sorry.”

“No, carry on,” says Daniel, his voice sounding very far away, his head a very present weight against Sungwoon’s thigh. “It’s very informative.”

Sungwoon glares at him. “Don’t be a dick,” he says.

“I’m not!” Daniel protests. 

Sungwoon rolls his eyes and turns back to the poem. “ _The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie open unto the fields, and to the sky; all bright and glittering in the smokeless air._ ” (Daniel’s head goes from against Sungwoon’s leg to into Sungwoon’s lap.) “ _Never did sun more beautifully steep in his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep._ ” (Sungwoon’s free hand finds its way into Daniel’s hair. Daniel hums, the sound coming from a place halfway between sleep and wake.) “ _The river glideth at his own sweet will: dear God. The very houses seem asleep; and all that mighty heart is lying still._ ”

Daniel’s eyes are shut, and his breathing is level. Sungwoon gazes at him for a few seconds—the slow rise and fall of his chest, the soft smile that had appeared on his mouth. his fluttering eyelashes. And then—”Are you watching me sleep?” he asks, not opening his eyes.

 _Oops._ “No?” he says.

Daniel laughs softly. “Read another poem,” he says. “Your voice is nice.”

Sungwoon’s cheeks colour so fast that he’s suddenly glad Daniel’s eyes are shut. “Um,” he says, turning the page. “Okay. _She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies; and all that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes._ ”

Sungwoon was no novice when it came to love poems, and he definitely had an issue with comparing the people he liked to the poetry and the books that he read, but this one had always felt—off-limits. Like Sungwoon would be committing heresy by trying to relate to it. But reading through it this time, with Daniel half-asleep in his lap, he thinks he understands what Byron was trying to say. He thinks he can understand how a person could have the best parts of the universe meeting in their eyes.

“ _But tell of days in goodness spent, a mind at peace with all below, a heart whose love is innocent,_ ” he finishes. “Um...Daniel?” Daniel doesn’t stir at all. “Daniel?”

But it was clear that Daniel was fast asleep this time, trapping Sungwoon on the sofa until he woke up. He looks younger in sleep, some of the day’s worries evaporating from his face, and distantly Sungwoon wonders how it would feel to wake up looking at Daniel’s sleeping form every day.

Then he takes that thought and all the thoughts related to it, puts it into a box, and sticks it behind the area in his mind that’s barricaded away by yellow police tape.

 

The next morning, Sungwoon wakes up with his neck upright against his shitty sofa, a book draped over the armrest and a cramp in his bones. He groans involuntarily.

“Morning,” says Daniel from the kitchen. “Sorry for falling asleep on you last night.”

“Are you?” Sungwoon asks.

“Nope,” says Daniel. He sounds far more cheery than he had been the night before. “I’m making eggs.”

Sungwoon squints, eyes adjusting to the morning light. “You can cook?” he asks.

“Sure,” says Daniel. “If cooking means knowing a total of two recipes, I definitely can.”

“What’s the second?”

“Instant noodles.”

Sungwoon laughs and stands up, walking towards the kitchen where Daniel was whisking eggs, a concentrated look on his face. “You know what they say about men who can cook,” he says.

“What, ideal type?” Daniel asks. Sungwoon blushes—Daniel catches his eye and grins. “Yeah, I know I’m not _your_ ideal type, but that must be _someone’s_ , right?”

 _If only you knew,_ Sungwoon thinks. “I have work,” he says instead of that. “So—what, do you want to stay up here, or?”

 

“Can I come with?” Daniel asks, his eyes widening excitedly. “I love your shop.”

“You’ve seen it in daylight literally three times,” Sungwoon says.

Daniel only smiles vaguely. “So, can I?”

Sungwoon frowns at him. “Do you really want to?” he asks. “I mean—you’re here because you don’t want to be in the limelight, and—well, you do remember that my business boomed after you were photographed coming out of it?”

Daniel stares at him for a couple of seconds, and then says, “Can you keep a secret?”

Sungwoon smiles. “What makes you think you can trust me?” he asks, which means _tell me anything you want me to hear_.

Daniel grins. “Just a feeling,” he says, which means _I’m going to take that as a yes_. “I don’t really know if I want to go back to acting after this.” He shrugs noncommittally, but Sungwoon has a feeling the confession means a lot more than he’s trying to let on. “My plan as of now is to stay abroad for a couple of months, go back, and just quietly finish off my contract. Or maybe terminate it. Not sure.”

“Have you got that much money?” Sungwoon asks.

Daniel shrugs. “Not enough so I’ll never have to work again,” he says. “But if I keep my head down it’ll stretch for a decent while. I’ve been doing this for the last—” He frowns, and then smiles. “Well, for a while.”

Sungwoon laughs, remembering the time he’d sat down to watch the first drama Daniel had ever been, a few years ago—he’d been fourteen, wide-eyed and very young, and it had been a high school drama. He remembers Sooyoung asking why all the main high schoolers looked like they were in their twenties, and then there was just this little kid. “I know,” he says. “I’m familiar with your filmography.”

Daniel cringes. “Have you seen the really bad stuff?” he asks, wincing.

“Yep,” says Sungwoon, grinning. “Come on, I’ll make an honest working man out of you yet.”

 

When Daehwi shows up that day he walks in, sees Daniel, turns around, and walks out again. Daniel, from where he is behind the counter, snorts. 

“Come on, Daehwi,” Sungwoon calls from where he stands behind the new and empty IKEA bookcase, on a ladder stacking books on the top shelf. 

Daehwi bursts in again, trailed by members of his strange nerdy posse. “Sungwoon!” he says, indignant.

“If you tell anyone you saw me, I’ll sue you within an inch of your life,” Daniel says dryly. 

“You’re supposed to _tell us_ when celebrities are in your shop!” Daehwi continues.

“He has a name,” says Sungwoon. He can’t see Daehwi from where he is, but he can imagine the frown on his face, possibly his arms crossed in indignation, perhaps joined by Hyejoo, snarking at someone, or Chaewon, looking vaguely lost, or Guanlin, earnest and blank-faced—and his perpetual shadow, Jinyoung, looking very much like he was embarrassed by everything Daehwi had ever done.

“Okay,” Daehwi says. “You’re supposed to tell us when _Kang Daniel_ is in your shop!” He pauses for a second. “Better?”

“I really don’t appreciate being treated like a piece of steak,” Daniel says.

“Isn’t that your entire career?” Jinyoung asks innocently.

“Jesus Christ, Jinyoung, you met the guy three seconds ago and you’re already being an asshole,” says Hyejoo. Smiling, Sungwoon climbs down from the ladder, ignoring the two open boxes that he needs to stack, and steps out to the front of the shop where Hyejoo and Jinyoung were in deep discussion about _something_.

“How are you not even surprised?” Daehwi asks. “Like, Chaewon and Hyejoo did their whole _oh my god_ thing, but you just walked in, shrugged, and started insulting people.”

“I told you guys Sungwoon was in love with Daniel,” Jinyoung says. “You guys just didn’t believe me.”

Sungwoon opens his mouth to vehemently deny it, but Daniel is quicker. “Sungwoon isn’t in love with me,” he says, laughing hollowly.

 _Yeah,_ Sungwoon thinks bitterly. _Because me being in love with you would be awful, wouldn’t it?_

There’s a brief interlude of silence, and then Chaewon asks, “Mr. Kang? Can I have your autograph?”

 

Daniel stays for two weeks. 

This would be fine, if not for a semi-habit that starts three days into Daniel living at Sungwoon’s apartment, after their third daily argument about whether Daniel should sleep on the shitty sofa or not.

“Sungwoon?” Daniel says, a couple seconds after being pushed into Sungwoon’s bedroom. At first, Sungwoon ignores it—thinking it was just Daniel trying to continue their argument. And then Daniel says, “Sungwoon, your bed is huge.”

Sungwoon’s heart stops.

He’d been trying to avoid any suggestion of that possible outcome. The bed had come with the apartment, from way back when it had been owned by a married couple—it was big enough to be shared, but Sungwoon didn’t _want_ that. 

“What do you mean?” he says, trying to keep his voice level.

“I mean,” Daniel says, sticking his head into the doorway. “If you just have one side and I’ll have the other, _neither_ of us need to sleep on the shitty couch.” He steps closer, eyes filling suddenly with concern, and Sungwoon knows that his mental anguish is clear on his face. “Or—if you’re not comfortable with it, it’s fine, it’s just—an idea—”

“No, you’re right,” Sungwoon says, inhaling deeply and smiling. “You’re right.”

Daniel pushes on, “No, but if you’re uncomfortable sharing, it’s fine—”

“I’m not uncomfortable,” Sungwoon says. _I’m all too comfortable with it_.

And he tries to stick on one side. Because Sungwoon might be stupidly lovesick and pining, but he’s not a creep and he’s _not_ going to take advantage of this, no matter how much the idea of waking up in Daniel’s arms is ridiculously appealing—

No, he thinks. He’s going to act normally, and when he next has enough he’s going to buy a new sofa and this could all be over. Well—it wouldn’t, because Daniel would still be _there_ , being handsome and sweet and funny and so similar to his public image and yet so different, so painfully _real_...

When he wakes up, somehow he’d ended up ridiculously close to Daniel, with Daniel’s arms around him and Daniel’s body all-too close, and Sungwoon’s heart sinks because he can’t do this.

And it happens again, and again, and again, until it’s not even something that should be momentous (but it _is_ , it’s painfully so). The first couple of times, Daniel laughs it off vaguely and doesn’t mention it—they never talk about it, about what it means, and the only time Daniel even acknowledges it is when Sungwoon is the one to bring it up. He knows how to take a hint.

Still, he thinks bitterly. You’d think that if Daniel was so quick to change the topic, was so embarrassed, that he wouldn’t keep doing it. You’d think that if Daniel was dropping all these hints that he didn’t see Sungwoon as anything other than a friend, that if he was _adamant_ that it didn’t matter—you’d think he’d have figured out how to spare Sungwoon’s heart. You’d think he’d just _keep to himself_ and stop _fucking Sungwoon over_ because Sungwoon can’t think of a way that Daniel doesn’t know how Sungwoon feels about it. It’s impossible. He’s been about as subtle as a brick.

 

And finally, it all reaches a peak. 

“Oh,” says Daniel suddenly, late Tuesday afternoon just over two weeks since he’d first arrived. “Oh!” 

Sungwoon turns to him. “What?”

Daniel grins. “I think I might be able to fix my image,” he says. “If I take the offer—but I should, shouldn’t I? Of course, I might have to lie a bit, but that can’t be that hard, I _am_ a professional actor, and…”

The words come crashing down. Daniel, leaving. Daniel, going back to Korea. Daniel, returning to being a faraway person in a television series or a movie, once again on a totally different plane of being than Sungwoon. Reaching heights that Sungwoon can’t even fathom, meeting people and perfecting his camera smile and becoming a stranger again.

“What do you think?” Daniel is saying. 

His voice sounds distant—like it’s not happening in real time, like Sungwoon isn’t in the room. “I don’t know,” he says, and it sounds more annoyed than he really should. “Didn’t you say you were going to quit?”

“I don’t know,” Daniel says. His eyes turn pitying. “Are you okay?”

 

“I’m _fine,_ ” Sungwoon says, but the concern in Daniel’s eyes stays there, painfully obvious, a knife twisted into Sungwoon’s gut. “Stop—stop that. Stop feeling sorry for me. I’m not something to feel sorry for.”

Daniel’s face falls. “I’m sorry.”

“I _know_ , okay?” Sungwoon says. “I know you’re off being rich and wonderful and heartthrob-y and successful and you feel _sorry_ for me, because here’s some random bookshop owner who’s pretentious and reserved and whose only friends are his sister and his most frequent customer, and—”

“That’s not how I feel,” Daniel says quietly. “That’s never been how I feel?”

“Oh, yeah?” Sungwoon says. “ _Then act like it!_ Stop trying—stop pretending that you’re worrying about me, stop—stop giving me your pity and your care when you _know_ that’s not what I want from you—you _know_ how I feel!”

“I know how you feel,” Daniel says. “That’s why—that’s why I’m so sorry.”

“Sure,” says Sungwoon. “That’s really what I want to hear.”

“I asked you,” Daniel says. “When I came here two weeks ago, I asked you if you’d feel uncomfortable with me being here because I _knew_ I felt about you in a way that you didn’t feel.” Sungwoon freezes. “I thought you’d feel uncomfortable with me—with how much I care about you. With how much I like you.”

The shock jolts through Sungwoon like a surge of electricity, lighting his entire body up in sparks. “What?” he asks.

Daniel’s eyes widen. “That’s not what you meant?” he asks.

“That’s what you were talking about?” Sungwoon asks. “I thought—I thought—”

Daniel stares at him. “Yeah, that’s what I meant,” he says. “I thought you knew, I thought you were uncomfortable with it—that’s why you never called me, because you didn’t want to have to deal with me, because I’m hopelessly pining for someone who doesn’t even like me back—”

“You like me?” Sungwoon asks.

There’s a silence—Sungwoon processing, Daniel cringing. “How could you _not_ know?” he asks. “I’ve been about as subtle as a brick—”

And Sungwoon doesn’t know what makes him surge forward and kiss Daniel with all his might. Was it the confession—was it the knowledge that Sungwoon hasn’t been alone in his desperation? Was it Daniel’s earnestly heartbroken eyes, was it the way he wanted Daniel to _know_ : _no, you’re not unrequitedly pining away, you’re not hopeless_? Was it the way Daniel had phrased that the same way Sungwoon had in his head, was it his sudden jolt of affection?

Or was it everything added up? Was it not that Sungwoon thinks he might have fallen in love between January and June ( _real_ love, not that five-minute infatuation), was it not a culmination of the brief touches and the smiles he locked in his heart and the nights sharing a bed and the fruitless but perfect date they’d been on? Was it not that Sungwoon had wanted to kiss Daniel for so long, was it not that he finally knew that Kang Daniel wanted him, Kang Daniel _liked him_ —

Daniel kisses like a starved man saved from a desert—desperately, urgently, hungrily. When he pulls away, he’s breathless, but he’s smiling wide enough to meet his eyes. This isn’t his big, perfect camera smile—this is the smile Sungwoon has started to associate with Daniel, the smile he started to fall in love with.

“Just think,” Daniel says, holding Sungwoon at arm’s length, eyes bright. “We could’ve been doing that months ago, couldn’t we?”

* * *

Sungwoon spots Sooyoung from across the arrivals section of Heathrow Airport—partially because she’s his sister and he grew up with her, but mostly because of the scowl she throws him when she sees who he’s with. His sister can be truly evil sometimes.

“Did I not tell you,” she asks, “ _not to fall in love with him_? And _what do you do_?”

Over the speakers, a pleasant female voice says _On behalf of London Heathrow Airport, we would like to remind you to keep your baggage with you at all times._ “Do you have all your bags?” he asks.

“Don’t change the subject, asshole,” says Sooyoung. She turns to Daniel, her hair flipping in the motion, a surprisingly dramatic movement for someone so nice-looking. “And _you_? Just showing up out of the blue, like one day Sungwoon is all annoying and pretentious and unlikable and suddenly he has a _boyfriend_!”

“Sungwoon isn’t unlikable,” says Daniel.

“Don’t turn this into a _who loves Sungwoon more_ contest,” Sooyoung says. “I am his baby sister and I win no matter who else is playing.” She grins insincerely and grabs Sungwoon’s arm. “Don’t I, Sungwoon?”

Okay, correction: his sister is truly evil _all the time_. “Don’t drag me into this,” he says. 

Sooyoung _hmphs_ , drops Sungwoon’s arm, and turns back to Daniel. “I’m watching you,” she says, motioning _I’ll slit your throat_ with her hand.

Daniel grins winningly. “Sungwoon, you never mentioned you’re the same height as your sister,” he says.

Sooyoung’s lips twitch, and for a second it looks like she’s going to smile at Daniel. “I need a coffee,” she says. “Buy me coffee.”

“I’m Kang Daniel,” says Daniel.

“Okay, _Kang Daniel_ ,” says Sooyoung. “Buy me coffee.” She tosses her hair slightly and marches on ahead of them, pulling her suitcase behind her and following the signs to the airport train station. Sungwoon smiles apologetically at Daniel.

“I don’t think your sister likes me very much,” Daniel says finally. Sungwoon searches his face for any sign that this upsets him, and finds nothing—only eyes bright with laughter and the slightest quirk of his lips—the same smile that had once mystified Sungwoon, which he now realizes is a smile of fondness, of affection.

“She’s like that with everyone,” says Sungwoon. “And she never really forgave you.”

“Forgave me?” Daniel asks. “For what?”

“She watched _Beautiful,_ ” says Sungwoon. “She thinks it was your fault that Seongwoo got sent to jail.”

Daniel grins. “God fucking damn it,” he says, sliding his hand into Sungwoon’s and half walking, half tugging him behind Sooyoung’s rapidly disappearing figure. 

Daniel meeting Sooyoung feels like an affirmation, like a tangible reminder that what they have is real, that what they have matters. And it should be scary, now, that Sungwoon seeing the stars in Daniel’s eyes is something known, that they have something between them capable of breaking. But it’s not scary. With Daniel, it feels like it’ll work out—with Daniel, it feels like it will be worth it even if it _doesn’t_. There’s so many different ways the future might look—perhaps Daniel will go back into acting, perhaps Cloud Books will go under, perhaps they’ll buy a house together. Perhaps they’ll break up and stay friends—perhaps they’ll break up and become strangers. But in all of the versions Sungwoon has thought over in his head, he can’t see a future without Daniel in it, in whatever capacity—and that future, he thinks, is going to be perfect.

_On behalf of London Heathrow Airport, we would like to remind you to keep your baggage with you at all times._

Well, almost perfect.

**Author's Note:**

> ledbury road, aka the road that sungwoon’s shop is on [x](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/19/Ledbury_Road_London_001.JPG/1200px-Ledbury_Road_London_001.JPG) [x](https://www.countryandtownhouse.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Ledbury-Road-rent-Strutt-and-Parker-.gif) [x](https://mr3.homeflow-assets.co.uk/files/photo/image/14595/8001/_x_/NHS140173_11.jpg)
> 
> this is the hotel daniel stays in [x](https://www.millenniumhotels.com/en/london/the-baileys-hotel-london/)  
> i got a BUNCH of hotel ads after looking this up i hope my sacrifices are appreciated
> 
> the poetry that gets read in the fic are “in flanders fields” by john mccrae, “composed upon westminster bridge” by william wordsworth, and “she walks in beauty” by lord byron.
> 
> i can be found on twitter [here](https://twitter.com/loonaslovegood) and on curiouscat [here](https://curiouscat.me/hyeashope).


End file.
